Grande Plage

This glamorous stretch of sand has a past that would horrify today's sunbathers. Before the parasols and the designer swimwear, this was a whale-butchering beach. From the twelfth century, Biarritz was a whaling town, and the Grande Plage was where they hauled the carcasses in for processing. Whale oil was rendered here to light houses across the region. The bones were used for building fences and furniture. The meat was eaten. And here's a detail you won't find in most guidebooks. The whalers gave the whale tongues to the church as voluntary gifts. Tongues. To the church.

The whaling industry was so central to Biarritz's identity that a whale appeared on the town's coat of arms. Whalers were exempt from taxation, which tells you exactly how much the community depended on them. But by the sixteenth century, the whales had started migrating elsewhere, driven by overhunting. Basque whalers didn't give up. They crossed the entire Atlantic Ocean to hunt off Labrador and Newfoundland. When that got harder too, they pivoted to cod fishing. Adaptable people.

The transformation from whale beach to glamour beach happened remarkably fast. When Empress Eugenie started bathing here in the eighteen fifties, European aristocrats followed. In the Victorian era, men and women had segregated bathing times with separate beaches. Eugenie helped popularise mixed sea bathing, which was considered scandalous.

Look at the beach today. It's almost impossible to reconcile the chic scene in front of you with the medieval whale-processing operation that happened on this exact sand. But that's Biarritz in a nutshell. A town that reinvented itself so completely that its origin story sounds like fiction.